Developing a Social Media Recruiting Strategy

What Is It?

Operating a business in the digital age presents a lot of hurdles and opportunities. One of the most overlooked opportunities in the recruiting space is the use of an effective social media recruiting strategy. The idea behind social recruiting is using social media platforms, blogs, and other internet sites to both acquire and qualify new talent. Below you will find the reasons you should adopt a social media recruiting strategy and some best practices so you can make sure to leverage this powerful recruiting tool to its full potential.

Why Use Social Media?

Reach Passive Candidates

According to a SHRM study on social recruiting, 75% of potential hires are not actively searching for a job but would be open to fielding great opportunities. They fall into the category of “passive candidates.” Passive recruiting has been making huge strides in recent years as an innovative and reliable way to recruit top talent across all industries.

Social media recruiting allows you to tap into this huge pool of “passive,” but potential candidates, and find people who are not only a fit for a role, but a fit for your company culture as well.

Show Off Your Company Culture

In the current job seeker market, potential employees are not only looking for the perfect role or a high salary; company culture is just as important in determining which company a candidate chooses to apply to, and ultimately accepts an offer from. What greater way to show how much better you are than that fancy new startup down the street than to use a social media recruiting strategy? Interacting with passive candidates where they spend the bulk of their time can strengthen both your company’s visibility and reputation.

Not only can social media help you to portray your company culture, it’s also a great way to interact with passive candidates who might be potential employees. For example, sharing a video of a fun company team outing might have somebody saying, “I wish that more companies would do things like this.” You might follow up with a comment detailing another great aspect of your company culture and/or a link to your current job openings. This is a great way to continue the conversation about how your company stands out from the rest and spark interest in your open positions.

Interacting with people on social media in a professional and timely manner can make all the difference when it comes time for job seekers to embark on their next career move.

Verify Information and See Into Candidate Background

Another plus to using a social media recruiting strategy is being able to verify information on candidates’ resumes, and make sure their background aligns with your company culture.

As a recruiter or hiring manager, you know it is an unfortunate truth that some candidates embellish and exaggerate their prior experience in order to get an edge on their competition. Using social media channels is a great way to do a quick and easy preliminary check prior to calling references or doing other conventional checks on a candidate’s experience.

When it comes to making sure a candidate’s values align with those of your company, social media is a fantastic tool to have in your back pocket. We all put our best face forward when interviewing and dealing with a potential employer, so it’s good to check candidates’ social media pages to confirm that what you are seeing in interviews is actually what potential candidates are like in their real lives. Adopting a social media recruiting strategy can help to ensure you hire the best people.

How to Leverage Social Media

So you’ve decided to implement a social media recruiting strategy – great! But how do you go about actually carrying out this plan to attract the most talented people to your company?

Engage Prospects, Don’t Spam Them

As we touched on earlier, it’s better to adopt a more inbound marketing approach – attract people to interact with your company through engaging content rather than just throwing your job postings out into the vast sea of companies, hoping you get a bite.

Think about what potential candidates would want to see and learn about your company that would make them excited to work for you. It is a lot more attractive to a prospective employee to see an employer that participates in charitable activities, shows off its amazing workspace, or has great employee testimonials about the company culture, than to be force-fed a boring list of open positions. People in this day and age don’t want to be sold to, they want to know what it’s like to work for your company.

Cut Through The Noise

There are a lot of companies competing for top tier talent right now. The last thing you want to have happen is to get lost in the mix and lose out on a rockstar new hire. Utilizing social media best practices such as using hashtags effectively, including a photo or video from a company event, and delivering engaging content on a varying schedule will help to keep you at the top of people’s minds and social media feeds.

When it comes to hashtags, there are two main strategies that you should employ: use popular hashtags that job seekers search for, and generate some unique ones of your own in order to differentiate your company from the crowd and start trending. Be creative and come up with something original that applies to both the position you are recruiting for and your company as a whole.

Photo and video content is almost always a necessity when it comes to making sure your social media content is seen by the most eyes and attracts the best candidates possible. Content with a photo or video has more than twice the engagement rate than the same post without it. This isn’t to say you should attach a photo or video to a post just to have one. Make sure the media you are using relates to the post and adds value to what you are trying to convey.

Scheduling your posts to go out at different times throughout the day and week can be very helpful when it comes to getting noticed. As much as the media wants us to believe people are glued to their phones 24/7, not everyone is going to see every post you make. By varying the time and day that your posts go out, you will improve your chances of finding that needle in the haystack.

Get Help From Current Employees

When it comes to social media recruiting, a lot of companies overlook one of their greatest resources – the power of current employees! Encourage your employees to share open job opportunities to their own personal social networks and increase the traffic you have coming to your job postings.

Motivate employees to be your social recruiting ambassadors with a rewards program or company wide competition related to the successful recruitment of quality candidates. Newton comes with employee referral functionality that makes finding candidates through your employees as easy as the click of a button.

Go Outside the Norm

Many companies only post on the big three (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) when it comes to executing on their social media recruiting strategy. While it’s great that companies are using the power of these popular social media sites to aid in their search, there is still a lot of meat left on the bone.

Some of the best places to find qualified applicants with the skill sets you are looking for are professional/association networking sites and forums. Not only are you going to find candidates who have the skill sets that match the roles you are hiring for, you get the added value of knowing that these are the people who are active, genuinely interested and engaged in their respective fields.

Another way to think outside the box and expand your social recruiting network is through the use of live streaming. This new way of connecting with people is experiencing exponential growth as more and more people hop on the cord-cutting train every day. Live streaming parts of fun company events/outings, or holding a live informational session about your company culture and open roles are great ways to attract new candidates and provide you with quick and easy video content to utilize down the road.

Summary

So, to recap here are some things you can start doing today to help build your own social media recruiting funnel:

Show your company off through social media. Post about your team retreats and events that demonstrate the type of employee culture your company has.

Be active on social media while using hashtags and creating content that specifically speaks to potential recruits

Leverage every social network or website you can where your potential hires are engaging. Don’t focus on only the big 3 networks for your outreach; dig a little deeper and find niche communities where specialized talent is hanging out.

Think outside the box. Find new ways to interact and reach potential hires.

Now that you’ve got the knowledge to start using social media recruiting to attract potential candidates, learn how Newton can help make the entire hiring process (including your job postings) as easy and stress free as possible.

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